Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  Preparing for classes, she sorted away books for the year, old paperwork and child psychologies and mnemonic abecedaries, stacking her library returns next to the Japanese ivy until she could take them back. Air that smelled of sun and cement came in warm drifts through the open windows, propped up permanently now that Clare’s air conditioner sat out on the sidewalk between a dented Maytag and ripening trash bags, found art for the garbage collectors; music from some neighbor’s stereo system like an argument through the wall, bass beats thumping out of sync with The Verve’s melancholy guitars and hanging piano chords, “Weeping Willow” set on loop while she worked. Comfort music, and the smile her mouth moved into surprised her; faded as the phrase’s edge turned inward.

  Off the top of the nearest pile, she picked up one of the books from the library afternoon with Brendan, considering weight in her hand before she opened it—blue ballpoint underlinings here and there, scrawled notes in the margins, some student’s academic graffiti—and read aloud, “There is heaven and there is earth and there are uncountable worlds throughout the universe but nowhere, anywhere is there a resting place for me.” It might have been an incantation, save that Menachem did not answer; save that it was not meant for him. Her voice jarred against the rich layers of sound, the dissonant backbeat from next door. Self-consciously, she put the book down, paranoiac’s glance around her apartment’s shelves and off-white walls as though some observant gaze might be clinging in the corners like dust bunnies or spirits.

  Brendan’s card was still bleaching on the windowsill, almost two weeks’ fine fuzz of dust collected on the stiff paper, black ink slightly raised to her fingertips when she picked it up and the penciled address on the back dented in to compensate. Swatches of late-morning light, amber diluted through a sieve of clouds, moved over her hands and wrists as she leaned over the straight-backed chair to her laptop; paused the music, Beside me, pulled up her e-mail and started to type.

  Full evening down over the skyscrapers, a milky orange pollution of light low in the sky like a revenant of sunset, by the time her doorbell buzzed; Brendan looked almost as startled standing in her doorway as she felt opening the door to him, so many days later than it should have been. Out of his suits and ties, grey T-shirt with some university crest and slogan across the chest and a worn-out blue windbreaker instead, he might have passed for one of the students that she had walked past a few hours ago at the library, younger and less seamless, Menachem without his glasses. Some shy welcome handed back and forth between them, too much space between replies, unhandy as an arranged date; he was still smiling, bright strands of hair streaked across his forehead with sweat and four flights of stairs, and Clare gestured him into the apartment with a wave that almost became a handshake, a panoramic introduction instead.

  As she stepped past him to lock up the door, deadbolt snap and she always had to bump the door hard with her hip, she caught the odd half-movement he made toward her, a slight stoop and lean, arrested: as if he had been expecting something more, an embrace or a kiss, Judas peck on the cheek before she led him in to the sacrifice. But he was no messiah, anointed in the line of David; there were no terrors and wonders attendant upon him, only halogen and shaded lamplight as he looked absently across her bookshelves, the stacks of CDs glittering on either side of her laptop, back at Clare coming in from the little hallway and she thought her heartbeat was louder than her bare feet on the floor.

  Shnirele, perele, gilderne fon: Chasidic tune she had not learned from Menachem, nothing he would ever have chanted and swayed to in his lifetime. She wanted to blame him anyway, as it ran through her head; nonsense accompaniment to her voice raised over the burr of the little fan on the bare-boards floor of her bedroom, behind the door half swung shut and her name in street-vendor’s dragon lettering over the lintel. “I didn’t see you when I took the books back this afternoon.”

  “Believe it or not,” he answered, “I don’t spend that much time at the library. Just that week, really. I needed some statistics.” Wary camaraderie, testing whether they could simply pick up where they had left off or whether this was a different conversation altogether, if that mattered, “I guess I just got lucky.”

  She had to smile at that, at him, dodging any reply as he picked up a paperback of The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash and flipped through the meticulous, ridiculous illustrations. Lights peppered the night outside her window, streetlights and storefront glare and windows flicked to sudden brightness or snapped off to black, binary markers for each private life; sixty-watt eyes opening and closing, as on the wings of the Angel of Death. There was a tightness in her throat that she swallowed, that did not ease. Hands on the chair’s slatted back, she observed, “You don’t have your umbrella.”

  Not quite an apology, waiting to see where these lines were leading, “No.”

  “It was a really scary umbrella.”

  The same near-silent laugh that she remembered, before Brendan said dryly, “Thank you,” and she thought in one burning second that he should have known better than to come here. On her threshold, he should have shied away, not stepped across the scuffed hardwood strip and almost knocked one worn oxford against the nearest milk crate of paperbacks: some twitch of memory, pole stars and shrugging with his arms full of umbrella, should have warned him off. Never mind that Clare had known no one who had flashbacks from Menachem, leftover remains of possession like an acid trip. She rarely saw again those people whom he had put on and taken off, unless she could not avoid them. Strangers made briefly familiar and not themselves, their secret that she carried and they might never guess: she never dared. If Brendan had any recollection of a dybbuk swimming like smoke in his blood, he should have run from Clare’s apartment as though she were fire or radiation, a daughter of Lilith beckoning from beyond his reflection, trawling for his soul. But he was standing next to her desk, perusing children’s books in the sticky breeze through the windows, and Clare did not want to know what he remembered from ten days ago, whether he remembered anything, and why he was still here, if he did.

  Before she could find out, she called softly, “Brendan,” and when he glanced up from Dr. Seuss, no catch in her throat this time, “Menachem Schuyler.”

  Bewilderment rose in Brendan’s face, but no following curiosity. The dybbuk was there instead.

  Always before, he had stepped sideways into being when Clare was not looking; now she kept her eyes on Brendan and saw how Menachem moved into him, like a tide, an inhalation, filling him out; rounding into life beneath his skin, his flesh gravid with remembrance. His features did not press up through Brendan’s, skull underneath the face’s mask of meat, but all its expressions were abruptly his own. She held on to the dog-eared, dreaming memory of his face seen under a tarnished metal sky, and said quietly, inadequate sound for all of what lay between them, “Hey.”

  Menachem said, “I dreamed of you.”

  A sharp, stupid pang closed off her throat for a moment. He had always taken the world for granted, for his own. Half rebuttal, half curiosity, “The dead don’t dream.”

  “The dead have nothing to do but dream.”

  “Don’t make me feel sorry for you.” Barely six weeks and already she might have known him all her life, to order him around so dryly and familiarly: childhood friends, an old married couple, and her next sentence stopped. Menachem was watching her through frayed-blue eyes, taller in a stranger’s bones than she had dreamed him. Brendan stood with Fox in Socks in his hand and was not Brendan, and she had made him so. She had always known that there was too little room in the world.

  No other way, no reassurance in that knowledge, and she said finally, “I dreamed of you,” and shook her head, as though she were the one possessed; nothing loosened, nothing realigned. “He’ll never speak to me again,” as lightly as though it did not matter at all, another possibility chopped short as starkly as a life by fever and louse-nipped chills; shove friendship under the earth and leave it there, a picture book for a headstone, a
n umbrella laid like flowers over the grave. “I liked him.”

  He put down the book that Brendan had picked up, soft slap of hardcover cardboard against desktop, like a fingersnap. His voice was pinched off somewhere in his nose, hushed and sympathetic; no comfort, and perhaps none intended. “I know.”

  “Our parents never promised us to each other, Menachem,” the name like the flick of a rein, the way his gaze pulled instantly to hers, a handful of jumbled letters to make him animate and rapt. “No pact before we were born. There’s no rabbinical court in this world that will rule you my destined bridegroom. This isn’t An-sky, this isn’t even Tony Kushner. I can’t write a good ending for this….” Too easily, she could recollect the particular scent of him, salt and iron gall and cigarette-paper flakes of bark, as she took a breath that still left her chest tight; barely a flavor in the warm night air, the phantom of a familiar smell. Halfway across the room, Brendan would have smelled like a newer century, Head & Shoulders rather than yellow soap, no chalk smudges on the shoulders of his coat. She said, inconsequentially, “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “You called me.” A thousand declarations she had heard from him before, promises as impossible and persistent as his presence; now he said only, “I wouldn’t stay away.” Then he smiled, as she had never yet seen Brendan smile and now never would, and added, “I’ve never seen your apartment before. You have so many books, my sisters would have needed a month to get through them all,” and Clare hurt too much to know what for.

  “Don’t.” Cars were honking in the street below her window, hoarse voices raised in argument; maybe shouting would have been simpler than this whisper that backed up in her throat, fell past her lips softer than tears. “I can’t look at these faces anymore. I’m trying to imagine what you look like, looking out, but there’s nothing to see. You’re here; you’re not here. There’s no one I can—find.”

  His voice was as soft, breath over Brendan’s vocal cords; the faint rise of a question waiting to be rebuffed. “But you held me.”

  “In a dream.” She made a small sound, too barbed for a laugh. “Forget everyone else, I can’t even keep you out of my head.”

  He blinked. Faint shadows on the walls changed as he took one step toward her, stopped himself, stranded in the middle of the room away from shelves, desk, doorways, Clare; apart. “I didn’t come to you,” Menachem said carefully. With great gentleness, no cards on the table, “You came to me.”

  Clare stared at him. He stared back, Brendan’s eyebrows tilted uncertainly, hesitant. Maybe she should have felt punched in the stomach, floor knocked out from under her feet; but there was no shock, only an empty place opening up where words should have been, blank as rain-blinded glass. Denial was automatic in her mouth, That can’t be true, but she was not sure that she knew what true looked like anymore. He had never lied to her. She had always been waiting for him to try.

  Brendan’s hand lifted, folded its fingers suddenly closed and his mouth pulled to one side in the wry sketch of a smile; Menachem, she realized, had been reaching to adjust his glasses, a nervous habit more than ninety years too late. “When I’m not… with you,” he started, choosing words as delicately as stepping stones, laying out for a living soul the mechanics of possession, occupancy, that they never discussed, “it’s what I said, Clare, it’s dreaming. Or it’s a nightmare. For a soul to be without a body, without a world…I don’t think I even believed in souls when I was alive,” and this shrug she remembered from an afternoon of fading storm-light and streets cobbled with rain. “But I am not alive. And maybe I know better, maybe I know nothing; I know that I was in the place like a snuffed-out candle, where angels take no notice and even demons have better things to do, and you were there. In a graveyard, but there. With me.

  “Clare, if there’s one thing I want in this world, in any world, it’s not to have died—I wanted so much more life, isn’t that what all the dead say?” If she should have assented, argued, she had no idea; she listened, and did not look away. “But I would have died an old man before I ever met you. I wonder if that would have made you happier.”

  Clare smiled a little, though it was not a joke. Do you love me? Four words tangible and thorny enough on her tongue that for a moment she thought she had actually asked them, the chill and sting of sweat across her body in the seconds before he answered, and a high school musical flashed through her mind instead. Golde’s squawk of disbelief, Do I what? and the scathing dismissal of her advisor in college, took Tevye and made him into a chorus line—tra-la-la-la-la, pogroms ain’t that bad! One of her own great-grandfathers had lost a brother in a maelstrom of shouting students and iron-shod hooves, taken a saber cut across his temple that he carried like a badge through two marriages, past quarantine in Holland and all the way to his New Jersey grave. Those same politics had no more than grazed Menachem, set him alight with ideas, left him for the angel of tenement bedclothes to destroy. Broken branches on the Tree of Life. She wondered if it looked like a birch sometimes.

  He was close enough now that if she reached out her arms, she could have held him as in dreams, in the flesh. He had kept the distance between them; she had moved, bare heel down onto the varnished pine as hard as onto folded cloth and something inside that crunched, snapped, would cut if carelessly unwrapped. Menachem was silent, no dares or teasing, cleverness proffered to coax her into laughter, her smiles that had paved the way for him in this alien, unpromised land; quiet, as he had been in rare moments when she saw through more layers than that day’s borrowed skin, as he had waited in the cemetery that existed nowhere but the fragile regions of dream. She could send him away now and he would never return, she knew this as though it had been inscribed on the inside of her skin, precise and fiery hand engraving on the level of cells and DNA, deep as belief. She needed no name holier than his own, nothing more mystic than the will not to want; and wherever the soul of Menachem ben Zvi v’Tsippe fled, it would be none of Clare Tcheresky’s concern.

  She said, knowing it had never been the turning point, this decision made long ago and the dream only its signatory, smoke from the fire that was every soul, “I should never have touched you.”

  Menachem’s cheerful slyness moved over Brendan’s lines and freckles, resettled into a twist of sadness around the corners of his smile. Perhaps he had said these words before, perhaps never; no matter. “You still haven’t.”

  This step she could not take back; the glass broken once and for all. “Then come here,” Clare said, “come to me.” As softly as though the words might summon a storm, make one of them vanish like a drying tear, she whispered, “Dortn vel ikh gebn mayn libshaft tsu dir,” and turned her hand palm-up.

  Brendan’s fingers did not close around hers, the dybbuk like an armature within his body, moving him; if he had reached to embrace her, she would have stepped back and screamed like a siren and maybe never stopped. But behind the pupiled lenses of his eyes, a color that was no color swirled, faded, bloomed outward and Brendan fell to his knees, painful double-barreled smack of bone against flooring and she would have reached out to catch him, but nothingness still spilled from him in streams and veils, flesh on flesh too easy a betrayal, and she had only room for one in her arms right now. Like trying to gather an armful of smoke, overflowing, reaching out to pull down a cloud: all vision and no weight. No chill against her skin, nothing like body heat, only the steady bleed that she watched disappear when it touched her outstretched arms, her fingers spread wide and her unguarded chest and throat, one skein even drifting against her face so that she saw through it, for less time than it took her to release the breath she had held, into a dull gleam of clouds and pewter, a crumble of ambiguous darkness like soot. Tattered glimpses of what lay between dreams, those of the living and those of the dead, and she would never close her eyes on only one world again. On hands and knees now, Brendan coughed, hoarse and racking, and his body jerked as though all its muscles were climbing away from one another under skin and cotton and
nylon; a tarantella of sinew and flesh that chattered Clare’s teeth, fingers buried in a lightning bolt and not enough sense to pull away, but the last nothing haze was soaking into her hand and gone.

  Dimly, through sheetrock and posters, she heard music starting up, the same electronic slam from this afternoon. After all the buildup, what a finish: walking three apartments down the corridor whose doors were all painted the same monotonous sage-green as the banisters and stairs that cored the building, and walking back again without ever asking them to turn down the noise, the endless party that always seemed to be happening behind 5G’s door once the sun went down; one ordinary night, with dybbuk. Her head felt no different, if dizzy, her fingers flexed and folded like her own; only someone might have hung lead weights from all her joints when she was not looking, so that she sat down abruptly on the floor beside Brendan, one hand out behind her for balance and the back of her knuckles brushed against the rumpled sleeve of his windbreaker. No danger, now. When she looked over and down at his long, sprawled form, merciful blackout or the next best thing, Clare realized that she was still looking for the little giveaways of gaze and movement and inhabitance, tell-tale pointers to the presence beneath his skin. She had never considered what it might be like to look for them in herself.

  She parted her lips to speak Menachem’s name, closed them instead. Beside her, Brendan stirred and groaned, “Oh, God,” a vague mush of syllables and sense; his face was pressed against her floor, his eyes still shut. Gently, she touched his shoulder and said his name, as odd to the taste as Menachem’s might not have been. Still she tried to sort through her thoughts, to find what she would say when he opened his eyes, what comfort or acceptable explanation, this last time with Brendan.